Homemade Blueberry Wine Recipe

Last summer, we happened upon an AMAZING deal on fresh blueberries at the Minneapolis Farmers Market. As we looked at the cases upon cases of blueberries that were available at that ridiculous price, Porter and I had the exact same thought: We should buy a TON of these, and make wine!

We had made a batch of blueberry wine from frozen blueberries a few years ago, and that was amazing – fresh could only be better, right?

RIGHT!

We made something like 10 gallons of this, but I’ve pared our recipe to be done “by the gallon”, so you can adjust for how many blueberries you have to work with.

No fresh blueberries? No problem, just substitute an equal weight of frozen blueberries! I would put them through a food processor, rather than squish them by hand – freezing and thawing berries breaks them down well.

As is, this batch ran pretty dry at the end, so we sweetened it up with a bit of sugar at the end. We like our wine pretty sweet, though.

If you haven’t attempted making wine before, don’t be intimidated! Check out our primer to home brewing, it starts here, with parts 2 and 3 here and here. Just a small handful of entries, and you’ll be good to go!

Pour mixture into a freshly sanitized fermenting bucket. Cover with sanitized lid and air lock, allow to cool to room temperature (overnight).

The next morning, give the mixture a quick stir with a long, sanitized spoon, and – using sanitized equipment – take a gravity reading of the liquid (strain out any blueberries). Keep track of the number! (This is an optional step, but will allow you to calculate your final ABV %)

Sprinkle yeast into fermenter, cover with sanitized cover and air lock. Within 48 hours, you should notice fermentation activity – bubbles in the airlock, carbonation and /or swirling in the wine must. This means you’re good to go!

After a week or so, use your sanitized siphon setup to rack the must into a freshly sanitized carboy. Put the carboy somewhere cool (not cold!), and leave it alone for a month or so.

Using sanitized equipment, rack the blueberry wine off the sediment, into a clean, freshly sanitized carboy. Cap with sanitized airlock, leave it alone for another 2-3 months.

Rack one more time, leave it for another 3 months or so.

When your wine has been racked a few times and shows NO more fermenting activity for a month or so (no bubbles in the airlock, no more sediment being produced, you can move on to bottling.

Follow the instructions on your selected type of wine stabilizer to stop fermentation. For potassium sorbate, this needs to be done 2-3 days before bottling.

Using sanitized equipment, take a gravity reading, then rack the wine into clean, sanitized bottles. Cork. (We like to use these for corking our homemade wine. Easy to use – no special equipment needed! – easy to uncork, and – should you have any wine left in your bottle after serving (pfft!), the “cork” is easily replaced for temporary storage!).

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Marie Porter

Marie is an award winning cake artist based in Minnesota's Twin Cities. Known as much for her delicious and diverse flavor menu as for her sugar artistry, Marie's work has graced magazines and blogs around the world. Having baked and designed for brides, celebrities, and even Klingons, Marie was proud to share her wealth of baking knowledge in her two cookbooks: "The Spirited Baker" and “Evil Cake Overlord”. Marie has also authored a book about her experiences surrounding the 2011 Minneapolis tornado: "Twisted: A Minneapolis Tornado Memoir"

We began this recipe about 2 weeks ago. Racked it today into 2 1/2 gallon growlers (it’s what we had on hand) and just for kicks, I took a gravity reading. It’s already at a 13.5%! We may have sampled what was in the test jar, and can I say, WOW. If it’s this good after 2 weeks, I can’t imagine how heavenly it will be in a few months. Thanks for the recipe. We used blueberry’s we picked along the creek on our property. We like it so much, we went and picked another 6.5 lbs today. They’re in the freezer waiting to be made into wine.

We Made this recipe and it turned out very good, it was simple and easy…
We then tweeked the recipe on the next 3 batches we did which were 10 gallon batches…

We used 5 Lbs of Rabbit eye blueberrys and 3 Lbs sugar per gallon of spring water….
We used a 30 gallon American Oak Barrel to store the wine for 6 months, the barrel was previously used to store bourbon whiskey.

After Fermentation was finished we then filtered the wine and then ran it through our copper pot still and produced 3 gallons of 100 proof blueberry brandy. it was absolutely wonderful flavor, the bourbon whiskey barrel added so much to the taste of the wine, then when distilled it was intensified.

Our next experiment will be to use a pouch and steep some coco into the wine while its heating and see if we can create a blueberry brandy with hints of chocolate….